To the depths of the mind

By Reviewer: FRANK O'SHEA

June 1, 2013 — 3.00am

THE GAMAL. By Ciaran Collins.

Bloomsbury. 466pp. $29.99

Breaking new ground ... Ciaran Collins, author of The Gamal.

The word is pronounced ''gommol'' and is usually heard in its abbreviated form ''gom''. It is used - mainly in the southern Irish counties - to describe someone who acts the fool: a messer, a dill, a ninny; it implies that some thought has gone into the person's actions, that he is a nuisance. It would rarely be used to describe a person with a mental disorder; he or she would be ''duine le Dia'', a person belonging to God or, as this book puts it, ''a God help us''.

Charlie McCarthy, the narrator, is not really a good example of a gamal, though there are hints in what he writes that the locals may have a different view of him than he himself has. He has been diagnosed as having Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), a condition that is characterised by aggressive reaction to any form of authority; it is usually seen in children below the age of 10 and is obviously disruptive to home, school and many forms of social interaction.

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Charlie is now 25 and, encouraged by his psychiatrist, is writing his account of a series of tragic events in his local community, events in which he has been mainly a silent observer, sometimes active participant. It is clear from what he writes that he is a disturbed young man, deeply traumatised by what he is describing; he has to leave the story for weeks at a time because what he is recalling brings on headaches and nausea.

Even when he is writing, he will interrupt to tell us how many words he has written or to recount some peripheral happening or to rant against his friends or his doctor or life in general. In places, to save having to describe things, he will use a photograph or a drawing or extracts from a court transcript. Despite what his psychiatrist tells him about chronology and secondary characters, he writes at his own pace and to suit his own moods.

The only people who see Charlie as more than a gamal are Sinead and James. They befriend him from primary school and involve him in their own lives, particularly in their music. She has a singing voice that can silence a rowdy pub or pause a Sunday Mass; he plays the piano. Together, they write and perform their own songs; they listen to Nina Simone and John Lee Hooker and Kate Bush. When he refers to one of these songs, he inserts several blank lines where the reader is supposed to write the words, because otherwise ''I'd have to pay the people who made up the songs millions to put the words of them in my book''.

Those music sessions and the progress of the chaste love story of Sinead and James leaves the reader fearful that it will all be too good to last. Because it is told out of sequence, there are plenty of hints of disaster, but when it strikes, it is devastating, all the more so because we learn about it from someone who loves both of the victims.

''Sorrows notice me,'' Charlie says in one place, and you cannot help reading what he has to say without a sense of foreboding, a feeling of a menace that lies behind his flippancy, humour and rural vulgarity. He uses his surly silences as an excuse to stay outside the crudity and petty rivalries that eventually bring tragedy. One of the charms of the book is that the reader is left with the uneasy feeling that Charlie is having us on, that he is giving us a carefully pruned version of events. He may be a gom, but he is no fool.

The depiction of village jealousies is reminiscent of Patrick McCabe, the language is Roddy Doyle transported to a rural backwater, but these are trivial comparisons. What first-time novelist Ciaran Collins has produced is much more than a pastiche of small-town Ireland; to describe it as a love story or a coming-of-age book or a treatment of mental illness would do it an injustice, though there are elements of all of those things.

With its mixture of mordant humour, astute observation and clever use of postmodern devices, it is a book that is unique in itself and breaks new ground in many ways. The voice is authentic, the language simple and direct, the atmosphere intensely claustrophobic; it is rare to meet a first novel of such merit.